


Genius

by quigonejinn



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-07
Updated: 2017-07-07
Packaged: 2018-11-29 04:00:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11432709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: Tony Stark isn't the only genius on the ground.





	Genius

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [November 23, 2008 on Dreamwidth](http://quigonejinn.dreamwidth.org/146029.html#cutid1). After hearing destronomics talk about the new Spiderman movie, I started thinking about this again, and decided to clean it up.
> 
> For additional notes, see DW post above.

Tony Stark isn't the only genius on the ground: at four, you took apart an early version of those read-and-sound electronic books. At six, you built your first robot from music box components and scrap wire. Some years later -- close to a decade, just a little less -- you combine what you learned at four with what you discovered at six, and it wins you the grand prize in the California State Science Fair competition. You are the youngest winner in history; nobody has even heard of your high school before. It's a small, insular world at this level of academic competition: the science teacher who entered your name doesn't know anybody, doesn't know your project, can't answer any questions about it, and since a certain defense company put up the scholarship money, you go on stage to accept the big check from Tony Stark.

Maybe it's the stage. Maybe it was your project. The two of you talk for forty-five solid minutes after the ceremony, and by the time you and your mom struggle home through traffic on the 91, there is a message from a woman, expensive, rich-sounding voice, basically asking, on behalf of her boss, if you would like to go on a play date next Thursday.

...

It's dry in the desert. Big spaces. Hours can pass without seeing another person on the road.

...

Stark Industries runs, after all, a talented and gifted program in Los Angeles public schools. Backstage, with people milling and shoving around and the closing speech still going on, Tony Stark asks you why he hasn't heard of you before, and you shrug. Like he pays personal attention to the enrollment of an after-school program, right? Plus, you don't go to a fancy private or charter school; you don't go to a deprived inner city or rural school, the latter two of which form the catchment district for Stark Talent. You go to a perfectly normal, middle, average suburban high school. The football team is average. The academic teams are average. Your parents didn't skip you any grades, but Stark asks you the first intelligent questions you've heard all fair long beginning from standing in the school gym rolling your eyes at everybody else's DNA models and volcano sets, through to the district-wide science fair where half the projects didn't come from kits, through to regionals, where actual statistical analysis started showing up, through to this, the State of California finals. You had made your Mom stay at the booth for fifteen minutes while you took a lap around the conference center, and you came back worried.

You shouldn't have been: Tony Stark wears a gray suit, shot through with blue thread. His tie doesn't have chemistry beakers or mathematical formulas or any cartoon characters or funny pictures. These are not your science teacher's ties. These are not even your father's ties, either, because you're pretty sure they didn't come from JC Penney and because they probably wouldn't melt if you held a lighter up to them.

" --ma'm, don't worry. Jarvis will be with us the whole time. Ask your daughter."

The expensive female voice had been talking, but Tony shoved into the middle of it, made the comment about not being alone.

"He's right," you say, trying to keep your face straight. "Jarvis."

Your mother does not want you to go, but when has she ever been able to keep you from doing anything you wanted? And you drop the magic words: scholarship money.

Here are the magic words for you: Tony Stark might wear thousand dollar suits and ten thousand dollar watches, might have a personal assistant with a voice like silk dropping over a French balcony, but he smells like WD-40 and has burn marks from soldering on his hands.

...

It's dry in the desert. Big spaces. Hours can pass without seeing another person the road, and in this particular desert, the ground is sort of beige-colored. A little red where the iron veins run close to the surface, a little yellow where the drop back down. It hasn't rained in months, and the heat, though dry, is oppressive.

A state trooper sees your car on the shoulder. He pulls over.

You try to look helpless.

...

You roll your window down.

...

Your mother is working that afternoon, so she can't take you. No problem, apparently. After school, you come out onto the parking lot, and a big blue Rolls Royce with tinted windows is waiting. You walk out to it, feeling very conscious of all the assholes and morons in the buses and coming out of the school, looking at you. The guy standing by the Rolls Royce door opens it. The hinge is on the opposite side of where it is in regular cars; it swings from the back, and after a moment of hesitation, you slide in, sit down, drop the bookbag off your shoulder. The leather seats so soft that they feel like -- they don't feel like any kind of leather you've ever touched before. It's dim inside the car.

Tony Stark is in the back, too; he wears sunglasses tinted the same color as the outside of the Rolls, and he chews gum.

"We're going to get stuck in traffic," you say.

"Yeah, let me introduce you to something known as a wet bar."

Tony pushes a button, and this thing swings out from underneath the seats. There are decanters, cups, ice, little slices of lime. All kinds of stuff. The guy outside shuts the door, and your eyes take a moment to readjust. The windows are that heavily tinted.

"Hello, I'm fifteen," you say. "Six years from drinking?"

"Oh come on," he says back, and your eyes readjust. It's too dark in the back to really see, and he pulls off his sunglasses and looks you dead in the eye. "Don't tell me you make it through eight hours a day of school without drinking."

You look at him for a moment, then start laughing, and the midnight blue Rolls pulls out ahead of the yellow school buses.

When it turns out that he doesn't have any sodas in the back seat -- no Coke, apparently, Tony Stark doesn't drink rum-and-Cokes -- you get seltzer water. The two of you talk about integrated circuitry all the way to Malibu in rush-hour traffic.

...

It's years before that stupid advertising thing starts, so you wouldn't put it that way, but making, inventing, thinking. Making. That's your anti-drug.

...

SHIELD finds you. The trooper finds you. Tony finds you.

...

Tony introduces you to Jarvis, and once you get a look at his code, you realize that you feel about Jarvis the way that most girls your age feel about Justin Timberlake or. That other guy. In the band. The one who pretends he can sing.

"You hungry?" At around 6 p.m., you point out that you should probably be getting towards home. "Jarvis can order pizza."

You don't ask about the pool, and you barely glance out at the view: when that happens, you realize, obscurely, that you have passed some kind of test.

...

Tony's personal assistant drops by after it's all over. She wants the blueprints and half-done models that Tony left with you.

Not the five desktops that Tony showed up with in Rolls one day and that you and Tony daisy-chained up to make a home-brew parallel processor. Not the thousands and thousands of dollars worth of catalog parts. Not the stack of custom-ordered circuit boards, drawn up to schematics that you and Tony thrashed out and that still sitting in the crate that they were shipped. But the blueprints. The models. You tell her to go fuck herself with an crowfoot socket wrench, and the next day, when you come home, there's another big, dark car parked outside the curb. Your heart does a funny little thing inside your chest, but then, you see the guy sitting on your front steps. It isn't Tony.

The weather is clear, as it tends to be in Southern California in this part of the year. The sky is blue; crabgrass grows in the cracks, and the lawn is more weed than grass. The sprinkler system is broken; you haven't gotten around to fixing it, and you stand on the sidewalk, halfway between the mailbox and the driveway.

You hook your thumbs against the straps of your bookbag.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi," you say.

"My name is Obadiah Stane," he says. He wears a suit that looks like Tony's, except where Tony wears his with blue or purple, this guy has gold and white. He stands up, and you realize that he is much taller than Tony is. Bigger, generally. In the shoulders. And older.

"I work with Tony," he says. "Those blueprints and models belong to us, Maya. You need to give them back to us."

...

SHIELD finds you. The trooper finds you. Tony finds you.

Not in that order, of course: the trooper comes out of the car, and you explain to him that you don't know why, but your car won't start. It just stopped. He helps you find the lever that'll pop the hood, and you get out of the car, and he looks at your engine, and you hit him with a hypodermic needle in the thigh. Then, you run back to his trooper car. His partner is sitting there, reading a fucking US News and World Report, and you gasp out the story about how his partner just collapsed or something, and as soon as he gets out of the car, you hit him with another needle full of tranquilizers. You drag him over the blacktop, put him in the trunk, and go back to the guy up front, then drag him back and stick him in the trunk, too.

You leave the cop car where it is, pulled over by the side of the road, but use a loop of rope, so that you don't have to close the trunk the whole way. You need them alive for what you're going to do.

...

The house that you and your mother live in is perfectly nice. Maybe it isn't as big as the houses of a lot of the kids who go to your school, and it's definitely not as big as the house that you lived in before Mom and Dad got divorced, but that's OK. It's just the two of you anyways, and you drop your bookbag in the living room and walk through to the kitchen. All the lights are off, and the curtain is drawn over the sliding door that leads to the patio, so it's dark and cool inside the house. Without thinking, you turn on the TV, then walk to the kitchen.

Obadiah follows you to the kitchen, but stays by the door while you walk around to the other side of the counter.

"Do you want something to drink?" you say.

He still doesn't say anything, and he keeps on looking at you, studying, thinking, measuring. You recognize the look from all over. It's what people give you when they're trying to figure out just how smart you are. To give him something to really think about, you turn your back to him, go to the refrigerator, and take out the carton of orange juice. You pour yourself a glass, but don't drink out of it. He still doesn't say anything, and you cross your arms over your chest.

"I want something in return," you say, squaring your shoulders.

He looks at you. Obadiah is big in your kitchen, especially in that cream jacket of his. He doesn't smell like WD-40 or anything comforting like that. He doesn't look comforting.

"Where are the models and the blueprints?" he says.

"You'll never find the blueprints or the models if I don't tell you where they are," you say. "So I think you should play ball with me, Obie."

He looks surprised that you know Tony's nickname for him and he is, after that, a little more inclined to respect you. In fact, he comes to the breakfast bar and says, yes, he'll have some orange juice.

...

Nothing happened with you and Tony, all right? You just learned a lot from him, and one day, he got distracted. For a couple months, you were his friend. He liked hanging out with you; he liked talking with you. He liked building stuff and talking and watching TV on the couch over there or hanging out at his place, and then, one day, he decided that he didn't want to play anymore. You realized, at that point, that you didn't even know his phone number, either on his cell phone or at home. You never had more than peripheral read access to non-core areas of Jarvis, and if you are old enough to talk terms with Obadiah Stane, you are old enough to know that calling the customer service line and asking to talk to Tony Stark wasn't going to do you any good.

You want in on the Stark Talent Program with all the funding perks, you say. Done. You want Stark Industries to pay for college. Where-ever you went, not just U Cal at Berkeley. Not just tuition. Room. Board. Books. Living stipend. Research stipend, so that you can stay out there during the summer and fund your research in a lab with a professor, if you'd like.

"You'll get it anyways if you do the program. We fully fund the educations of every qualifying participant."

"Oh," you say, with a little of the air taken out of your sails. He grins and leans back against the counter. You poured that glass of orange juice for him; he drank about half of it. There's pulp stuck on the side.

You're studying it, thinking about how they look like bacteria in solution, caught under a slide, and are trying to remember which staining solution makes gram positive bacteria that vivid orange color when Obadiah says, interrupting your thoughts, "What else do you want?"

You look up.

You want your mom to to get a nice job at Stark Industries. With a real salary and health benefits. And stuff. They aren't going to fire her, ever, or you will tell every tabloid, newspaper, and gossip columnist in town that Tony Stark spent two months fucking you.

Obadiah looks at you for a moment, then bursts out laughing. It's loud, rich-sounding, and maybe this is why Tony likes him so much. "Done."

...

You realize -- a little at that time, but fully, later -- these things that meant so much to you, that would have cost your mother so much: what does two hundred thousand dollars mean to Obadiah Stane? What does paying sixty thousand dollars a year to your mother until she's sixty-five and her pension vests mean to Tony Stark?

That's another lesson you learn from them.

...

In retrospect, it was probably dumb to turn the TV on like you did. If Obadiah had really wanted to kill you, the TV would've helped cover any noise that you managed to make.

Then again, if he'd really wanted to kill you, he was probably strong enough to do it before you could make a sound.

...

The trooper wakes up in your lab. You've strapped him to the table, and an IV is putting the serum into him, and you can already see the black tracing up his arm, following the artery. Now, it's to his shoulder. Now, it disappears inside his chest. You wait for it to show back up again; it'll take a while, and you move your eyes from him to your readout screen. Him, to your readout screen. You keep the lab around fifty-five degrees because that's the temperature the serum works best at, you've found, so the guy has goosebumps up and down his arms. You've stripped him down to t-shirt and briefs.

"Oh God," he says, when he sees you.

He tests the restraints holding him down. You sit down on the chair next to him; there's a stopwatch in your right hand and a clipboard in your lap. The lab isn't as well-lit as you'd like. Right now, there are a couple of fluorescent lights over the lab bench, and a big overhead by the table where the trooper is strapped down. There is, though, just enough light for you to read the stopwatch in your hand and to write on the clipboard.

"Who are you?" he says.

You look up at him and time how long it takes for the black to streak up his neck, how long it takes for the black to cross his eyes and make them a solid color: after all these times, it's still satisfying. It took you so many trials to get nanobots that would penetrate the human blood/brain barrier.

...

"You're a bright girl," Obadiah says, as you walk him back to the Rolls. "After this education of yours that we're going to pay for, you should think about coming to work for us."

The driver opens the door, and Obadiah looks down at you. You look back up at him.

You think back to that moment a lot, and you realize just how easily he could have made you disappear, either back when the two of you were in the house or by shoving you into the Rolls. The people on your street were used to seeing you get into them, after all. You don't say anything, but keep on looking at him. It's hard to describe how you feel right now: it's almost like you are not in your body, but at the same time, you are looking out through your eyes. You take in every detail of Obadiah's face, his suit.

"Or maybe not," Obadiah says, grinning. The sky is very blue behind him, and you have the feeling that if you were a boy or a couple years younger, he'd ruffle your hair.

Instead, he sits down inside the car, and the driver shuts the door. You go back into the house, through the door, through the back door, and out to the project you've been working on since you were twelve: the models and blueprints that you told Obadiah he'd never get without you were just lying on your bed, neatly boxed up and ready to go. He waited in the kitchen while you went and got them for him, and now, there's an empty spot on your bed. While the Rolls pulls away, you think about that empty spot, for just a moment.

Then you go back into the house, through the door, through the back door, and start unhooking the tarp.

Sometimes, you have to build something very big in order to build things that are very small.

SHIELD kicks down the door about fifteen minutes into you starting on the second police officer.

...

When you were twenty-one, you had _significant_ options available to you. You were graduating from MIT with the same kind of honors that Tony Stark graduated with; in fact, you'd managed to do him one better, in that he graduated with a BS. You, in fact, had a Masters. There were at least two professors at MIT who would welcome you into their labs. If you really wanted to, you could probably finish your PhD work in three years. Four years, max, if you could get funding lined up quickly.

Two weeks before graduation, you come back from doing the Sunday morning walk of shame back after spending the night in the bed of a brunette who was, quite definitely, not your (very blonde) girlfriend.

You have an off-campus apartment that the Howard Stark scholarship pays for, and you drop your keys on the kitchen table by the door and flick on the lights.

There are some people in your apartment. More specifically, two people black suits are standing in your kitchen, and the big motherfucker with the eyepatch and the leather trench speaks.

"Ms. Hansen," he says. "We have a proposition for you."

...

You do the math, and you check the newspapers. You compare notes with a couple of other students and grad students who are almost your level, and you realize that the uptick in recruitment all happened about the time that Tony Stark came back from Afghanistan and announced that he wasn't making weapons anymore.

What happened? The number of geniuses in the world with the skills and inclination to make lethal things that killed a lot of people, very fast, changed.

Tony Stark put himself out of play. Everybody went looking for his replacement.

...

SHIELD finds you. Again. Tony finds you. Again.

Every year, Stark Industries flies the Howard Stark full ride scholars out to the annual shareholders meeting. There is a little song and dance where Stark Industries shows what a good corporate citizen it is by bringing the lot of you out onto stage, talking about how you guys are the future of Stark Industries, the future of America, and beforehand, there's a meet-and-greet with Tony Stark. Most of the other students there -- MIT, CalTech, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon -- are thrilled to pieces. One guy almost starts crying because, he explains, Tony has been his idol since he was about seven years old.

For your part, you know that Tony looks distracted; he keeps his sunglasses on, even backstage, even indoors, and you don't expect him to recognize you when his current personal assistant, a tall, cool-looking redhead, starts to introduce you, but before she can get your name out, you say, "It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Stark."

He takes your hand, looks at you for a moment, as if he almost remembers. And then you smile and let go of his hand, and the next Howard Stark scholar eagerly shoves into your place.

Does Extremis find you?

...

Your mother has a decent job at Stark Industries, and she also happens to be good enough at it that, by this point, you're pretty sure that there doesn't need to be any kind of directive from Obadiah keeping her in. In fact, two months after you join SHIELD, she gets promoted. She starts dating a guy that she met while shopping for the new furniture she bought herself as a present for getting promoted. You see her off and on through the half-decade that you're a SHIELD researcher in good standing, and she expresses, occasionally, how much she wishes you'd go back to school and get your doctorate.

"I know you love your job, honey, but how much research are you actually doing at the National Institute of Standards and Technology? You've always wanted to do research. Ever since you were little. Being a scientist is the only thing you ever wanted to be."

She pauses and looks at you across the restaurant table. "I just want you to be happy, Maya."

...

That's where your mother thinks you still work. At the government agency that makes sure a foot is really a foot. That a liter is really a liter. That a mile is really a mile.

Nick Fury, you've realized, has a pretty shitty sense of humor.

...

Yeah, no, that's the National Institute of Standards and Technology that kicks down the door and comes swarming in tactical gear, and that's a National Institute of Standards and Technology-spec modified Stark rifle being shoved in your face.

...

You remember the last time that you saw Obadiah: you were brand new SHIELD when he went crazy and tried to kill Tony, but you went to that Howard Stark scholar publicity stunt, and even though Tony didn't recognize you on the dais, didn't care to know any of the names of the bright-eyed fans who were there to meet him, Obadiah remembered you. When the pack went backstage, he grabbed you by the shoulder and pulled you aside.

You got a couple of envious looks from the rest of the pack. Most of them were probably big enough geeks to know who Obadiah Stane is and how important he is to Stark Industries.

"How are you doing, Maya?"

You look back at him. His beard is more gray than brown now, but the years look good on him. "You remember me."

"I don't get shaken down by a lot of fifteen year old girls." He considers you for a moment. "I've seen your grades, Maya, and I've seen the reports that your professors write about you. You know that we get them to write reports to us, right?"

"Yeah, I knew that." Actually, you didn't, but you file that information away for later. You remember from your memory of seeing him stand out besides the Rolls, that Obadiah Stane has very blue eyes, but in the shadows of backstage, you can't really see what color they are.

Out front, Tony has started giving the keynote speech. The audience, you suspect, is laughing right on cue.

"Have you changed your mind about working for Stark Industries?" Obadiah asks. "For me?" 

...

If you'd been working for Stark Industries, you would have been working for him on the secret arc reactor miniaturization project. If he'd put you on the project, you would've been able to build one for him. If you'd built one for him, would he have tried to kill Tony quite so obviously? Would SHIELD have been able to get Iron Man if they hadn't been able to ride to the rescue?

"They've got all their vital signs," the medic says, straightening from checking the second state trooper. "I don't think there's anything wrong with them."

But the troopers are non-responsive. Both of them. You bow your head, smiling; you let them cuff your hands, and they lead you out of the lab.

You worked for SHIELD long enough to know that the greedy bastards strip every last scrap out of equipment, code, and research from your lab and bring it back to the Helicarrier.

Greedy motherfuckers.

...

"Does Tony Stark know you engineered the backdoor to Jarvis? The one that got Obadiah Stane in?"

Since you're being un-cooperative, they're administering truth serum. Your arms have been strapped to the table, and a technician is pushing it into you with a needle that looks like it could give elephants enemas. The shit burns in the bloodstream, too, and you can feel it take effect. The urge to please, the urge to --

"Is this what you left SHIELD to research?"

"Does Tony Stark know that that SHIELD had been watching Obadiah and the Ten Rings?"

"What were you researching, Maya?"

"Does Tony Stark know that you watched him get snatched on the Jericho test?"

Nobody answers you, except to ask more questions, and you scream when the truth serum hits past your shoulder. This, maybe, is what your test subjects felt when you worked on them. It was probably worse, actually, and when you feel the serum start burning through to your heart, carving through your muscles, you try to bite down on your lip through the screaming so that you won't answer their questions, and they hit you to dislodge your teeth from your lip, so that you can't hold the words back, and they up the dosage, and you try jerk out of the chair, but the straps are thick, and you can feel the urge to answer, the urge to please welling up into you, but then, thank God, the walls give this deep, deep shudder, and they don't notice, but you do, and --

...

Tony Stark finds you, and you go over to his house after school to check out his stuff. You know what Jarvis is within him saying five words to you, and you and Tony stand in the foyer for thrity-five minutes while you try to break Jarvis's language engine. Talking fast, talking backward, language puzzles, logic puzzles, speaking in lines of pure code. By the time you finally get him to say a nonsense question, you and Tony are both grinning like six year olds who've found each other on the playground. He introduces you to Dummy and Butterfingers, and you scratch them behind the wrist articulation and practically see them wag their battery packs.

You ask him a question about his choice of sensory processing code. He explains the engineering choice he made; you don't believe him when he says it'll work, so he shows you, and elbow to elbow with him, poring through code thrown up into the air and arguing with Jarvis and nudging Butterfingers out of the way when you went to get a cream soda from the fridge and watching Tony read code that you'd written, checking over a circuit he'd just laid -- he meets your eyes, and you meet his.

A couple nights, you and Tony fall asleep on the couch together. The TV is on; Jarvis is compiling the code that the two of you wrote. You have a cream soda in your lap. Either Butterfingers or Dummy bring blankets because when you wake, some are tucked around you, and Jarvis is gently flashing an icon on the bottom of the TV screen, over Good Morning America, indicating that it's time for you to go to school.

Also, that the compile is finally done.

...

There wasn't a scrap of lust in it, for the record. Tony likes people around his age, and you like girls. You aren't anywhere near his age; he isn't anything like a girl. The only romance was the joy that comes from realizing that neither of you is alone out there in the universe. Of being able to work in the lab with another person and not have to slow down to explain anything.

"Not bad," you say, when Tony shows you what he made at sixteen. "For 1988."

He grins and asks what you'd change. You tell him. At length.

...

Tony finds you. Obadiah finds you. SHIELD finds you.

...

"What happened? What did you do?"

Your mouth is full of blood, and the female interrogator hits you again. You laugh and show her your mouthful of blood. She raises her hand to hit you a third time, but the somebody else -- you can't see far enough to determine who, stops her.

"You plugged in my computers," you say. You can feel the blood running down your mouth, and you're pretty sure a tooth or two has worked itself loose.

"Unplugging won't help, by the way."

Later, after they're forced to bring Tony in, pulling him away from dealing with a freeway collapse in Des Moines, because nobody else can clean out their computer systems. At the augmented rate of power drain, they only have five hours of power left in the emergency servers -- they'll just have time to figure out that by slowing down the screech blasting through the fifty, sixty times, they'll find that the screech is actually composed of human voices, speeded up. Made electronic. Coursing through the circuitry of the ship.

Begging.

...

Tony finds you. Obadiah finds you. SHIELD finds you.

...

Extremis doesn't find you. You make Extremis. You teased it out of the fabric of the universe, though really, getting to hang out with Tony Stark wasn't the reason or motivation why you left SHIELD to develop it. It wasn't even even in the top twenty. Or thirty. Or fifty. There are a hell of a lot of other ways you could have gotten his attention again, though you're pretty sure that's what SHIELD tells him and what he's thinking when he comes in to talk to you. There are nukes on board. You know it. SHIELD knows it. Tony knows it.

Really, there are plenty of other ways you could have gotten to get to this place, none of which would have involved you being cuffed to a chair with truth serum burning through your veins while the Helicarrier shakes and rolls and trembles because the digitized souls of two terrified Arizona state troopers have taken control of the world's only flying carrier.

He comes in with his helmet off, but the suit still on. He puts the helmet down on the table, but doesn't settle in the chair across from you -- the chair probably wouldn't take the weight, you'd guess.

"Hello, Maya," he says.

"Hello, Tony," you say. The ship shudders and lists to one side.

He frowns, but you smile. The lights flicker, and your guess is that the troopers are going to start shutting off air circulation next as they drill their way through whatever shit excuses of firewalls SHIELD is putting up to stop them, so conceivably in about forty-five minutes, unless you tell Tony how to stop them, the Helicarrier is going to make a pretty decent-sized crater in northern Arizona, but you hold the smile: it's clear as day. As math. He wants to look away, but won't let himself. No matter what Tony pretends to be these days, no matter after all these years apart, the two of you -- underneath the anger, there is excitement in his eyes. He wants to know.

No matter what Tony pretends to be these days, no matter all these years apart, the two of you are still two of a kind.

You shift. You smile, and if you weren't tied to a chair, if this were your mother's kitchen, you'd see if he wanted an orange juice.

He looks a little uncomfortable. The SHIELD guard who is there to shut you the fuck up if you so much as breathe in Morse code about all the twenty years of surveillance they've done on Tony Stark -- he clears his throat.

You shift. You smile, and you ask: "Do you want to hear about my science project, Tony?"


End file.
